My Grandfather's Gallery: A Family Memoir of Art and War

by Sinclair, Anne

  * * *

  Then, in that letter that overwhelmed me, as if I had opened a door that should have stayed firmly shut, out came the rancor and jealousy that remained an undercurrent, a constant presence in the ensuing years. “Sadly, you didn’t give me time to put a roof on my building, before the evil words of a serpent were whispered in your ears. They distorted, ridiculed my every deed,” my grandfather writes in bitter, biblical terms. “I have much to reproach myself for. I should have spent less time on my business and devoted myself more to you … Life became torture for me in 1923, I loved you with all my heart and felt that I was losing you. Alas, you were given empty promises for the future the better to seduce you, promises that never came true, but that you thought were real, as if happiness didn’t lie in the devotion of a close family.”

  Paul had come from a family that was doubtless filled with the anxieties of Jews from Mitteleuropa. His wife, who had been integrated into French society for a longer time, was more playful and carefree; she needed love, and mostly what she got was money. How could anyone have imagined that the “devotion of a close family” would have satisfied a woman in 1930? Meanwhile, her suitor dazzled her with a vision of the high life, the flashiness of a society that, as we know, was dancing toward the abyss in the interwar years. And yet Paul, a pessimist by temperament, gloomy by nature, was already on that brink.

  “You were beautiful, everyone found you amusing, you were wooed and desired by many men, and while thinking that you were making yourself happy, you made us both unhappy … Your sarcasm, relying on a so-called protector, about whom I hope my son will one day ask for an explanation, your way of saying ‘too late’ when I declared my love to you, darkened my character, and I had to seek consolation and oblivion in work, as indeed I continue to do,” he writes in his own defense.

  Apparently, my grandmother got bored with the marriage. Perhaps she was frivolous, responsive only to surface and luxury. That’s what seems to underlie my grandfather’s thinking.

  “I want to tell you all this on the eve of my departure so that you know, my dear Margot, that your ambition for wealth was a desire for appearance, for possession. As for me, my sole desire was to make you happy (the children and you), and assure you that I would grant you all a secure future that would enable your independence. No, Margot, I can’t rebuke you anymore. Time masks all wounds, but my own still bleed with the loss of my happiness. In order that your heart may cease to suffer, that posthumous remorse may not be too much of an affliction, I shall shoulder some responsibility myself. My own character, I confess, is very self-contained, and I should have liked to find in you a less skeptical person, someone more profound, with whom I could have exchanged ideas, shared my aspirations, and talked about something other than trivial matters. And if at root your being is devoted solely to goodness, then your spirit and your mind are incompatible with the needs of a serious, loving and devoted man.”

  I don’t believe my grandmother was ever aware of this letter with its very accusatory, self-justifying language and tone. I very much hope that is so.

  She wanted a divorce, but my grandfather was adamantly opposed to the idea. Since, according to their marriage contract, all property was held jointly, I suspect that love and rage were not the only reasons for his refusal to divorce. From the moment Margot gave up her life as Wildenstein’s lover and sacrificed her life as a woman, she punished Paul by relinquishing all interest in his social and professional world; by refusing to do any of the things that might, in my grandfather’s eyes, have been expected of the wife of a major Parisian art dealer.

  * * *

  Sixty years later, and the Wildenstein name pops back into the public eye. I’m skimming one of the newspaper stories in which you never know what’s true and what’s made up, gossip about inheritance scandals, unscrupulous art evaluations, or suspect fiscal investigations of them. The French have little sympathy for people with vast fortunes, and there can be no doubt that this family of prosperous art dealers falls into this category. Although it’s also possible that malice dictates what the papers say.

  On the other hand, I remember a story from about ten years ago, when the Wildenstein family brought a case against Hector Feliciano, the author of The Lost Museum. He was said to have defamed them by claiming that Georges Wildenstein, my grandmother’s alleged lover, had done deals with the Nazis. That was what suddenly prompted me to seek out the details of the case when my own family’s private history came to light.

  The trial took place in 1999. The Wildenstein family was furious: “What could be more horrible for the members of a Jewish family than to find themselves implicated in an act of betrayal, of collusion with the German occupiers against France!” … “The Wildensteins loved France so much that even then they didn’t buy German cars,” their lawyer, Maître Chartier, declared. This is a curious response, one that negates sixty years of Franco-German reconciliation and throws history back in the faces of the Germans who are so dedicated to consigning it to oblivion. But in the end, I’m more concerned with the family-related intrigues of the past than with the German cars of today.

  The Georges Wildenstein Gallery was actually run during the war by a certain Roger Dequoy. This is where the stories diverge. According to the Wildenstein family, Georges had severed all communication with his former employee, who was going so far as to disparage him in letters that he, Dequoy, sent to the General Commissariat for Jewish Questions. As far as the family was concerned, Dequoy’s assertions were false and malicious.

  According to Antoine Comte, the prosecution lawyer, Dequoy acted as an intermediary between Wildenstein and the German authorities. As evidence for this he cited a meeting in November 1940 in Aix-en-Provence among George Wildenstein, his employee Dequoy, and Hitler’s art dealer, Karl Haberstock. In the course of this conversation, Comte claimed, an agreement was reached: Wildenstein recovered some of his confiscated property and was able to reopen his gallery under Dequoy’s name; in exchange, Dequoy is said to have agreed to work for the Nazis.

  A serious accusation but one that, according to the prosecutor, was based on papers in the American archives of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, later the CIA), which were declassified in 1998 and were said to contain a special report on the Wildenstein Gallery that had been compiled in 1945. The existence of both the agreement and the OSS report is confirmed by Lynn Nicholas in her book The Rape of Europa: “In November [Haberstock] and Dequoy went to Aix, where they met Wildenstein and came to certain agreements … It was proposed that Wildenstein would exchange ‘acceptable’ pictures from his stock for the modern works so unacceptable to the Nazis, which Haberstock would send to him in the United States. Wildenstein would sell them through the New York branch of his firm.”

  Initially, the Wildensteins were denied the six million francs in damages and interest that Alec and Guy Wildenstein, Georges’s grandsons, had demanded for the assault on their grandfather’s memory, which resulted in the family’s decision to appeal the case.

  After the court of appeal refused to overturn the initial judgment, the daily newspaper Libération, quoting the court’s final statement, said that Georges Wildenstein “can legitimately be presented as one of those individuals who on the one hand cultivated ‘ambiguity,’ both as a ‘victim of the looting of the occupying forces,’ and on the other, ‘in parallel pursued, via an intermediary, operations on the Parisian art market’ under the occupation.

  “In the court’s opinion, ‘the allegations of contacts with the Nazis by Georges Wildenstein cannot be called manifestly erroneous’ since it is established that Wildenstein ‘had, before the war, entered into a business relationship with Karl Haberstock, who was known to be one of the Führer’s artistic advisers and a high-ranking Nazi. During the occupation, Haberstock acted as a protector of Roger Dequoy … who was running the gallery in Paris at the time, and who ‘one may imagine was keeping up relations with Georges Wildenstein,’ in exile in New York. There is ‘much eviden
ce to suggest’ that the famous art dealer, whose collection had been partly looted by the Germans, ‘maintained business contacts with the occupying forces.’”1

  This ruling, disobliging at the very least, led the Wildensteins to appeal once more in the Cour de Cassation, which is supposed to judge only procedural matters. A new disappointment for the family: the court declared that the statute of limitations on the action had passed; the Wildensteins should have brought their suit within three months of the publication of Feliciano’s book The Lost Museum.

  This troubling story, on which I shall not attempt to give an opinion beyond citing the three successive rulings of the French judicial system, casts a deep shadow over my grandmother’s love affair.

  Did their relationship last for a long time? At this point it would be virtually impossible to tell. But who, really, was this man who slipped into my grandparents’ lives, coming between them? Was he a passing fancy or an archrival delighted to destabilize his competitor? Could he have been worth the suffering he caused?

  And who, really, was my grandmother? A passionate woman in need of love or a socialite fascinated by appearances? My grandfather was a good husband, in the sense of the phrase in those days, but in all likelihood he wasn’t terribly exciting from a romantic point of view. My grandmother wanted to enjoy the carefree years between the wars. She was undoubtedly more hedonistic, more intoxicated by glamour than her husband, who was so preoccupied with the development of modern art. She wanted to dance, to enjoy herself, to be loved. He wanted only to work. This was the classic story of the romantic Emma and her stodgy Charles in Madame Bovary, or the flamboyant Ariane and the fool Adrien Deume in Albert Cohen’s novel Belle du Seigneur. But my grandfather was neither a killjoy nor a petty bureaucrat; he was a curious and innovative spirit. All he needed to do was look away from his Picassos for a moment to gaze at the Renoir—pretty, charming, and curvaceous—that he had in his bed.

  Eighty years have passed since then. “Et la mer efface sur le sable / Les pas des amants désunis,” as Jacques Prévert wrote and Yves Montand sang: “The sea washes away / The footprints of parted lovers in the sand.”

  PI-AR-ENCO

  New York, once my family’s city of refuge, and also my birthplace. The family archives are still on East Seventy-ninth Street, in the four-story town house that was home to the last Galerie Rosenberg.

  My grandfather, who arrived with his wife and daughter in the autumn of 1940, initially moved into a house closer to midtown, on East Fifty-seventh Street, where he set up his gallery in 1941 and which he left thirteen years later.

  I have few memories of Fifty-seventh Street. Paul rented that stately old house, owned by the queen of England, who had a considerable property portfolio in Manhattan, but he had grown weary of the old building and wanted to live in a home of his own.

  He bought his house on Seventy-ninth Street, between Madison and Fifth avenues, from Chester Dale, one of his major clients. After a lot of renovation, the family moved into the building in 1953. Paul was seventy-one. He lived there for only six years, increasingly passing responsibility for the running of the gallery to my uncle Alexandre.

  This location on the prosperous Upper East Side, a bit sedate but elegant, wasn’t a bad spot for business in the 1950s. In setting up shop there, my grandfather started a trend among gallery owners. Soon all his competitors who had established their galleries in midtown, just as he had, moved north, to within a few blocks of his new address at 20 East Seventy-ninth Street. By the time I was a child, it was bustling with art dealers.

  * * *

  Paul Rosenberg and Company was the name of the business. PR & Co. “Pi-ar-enco” to my childish ears, making me wonder what crazy-sounding person we were sharing our house with. I spent so many childhood Christmases there that until recently New York was an enchanted place as far as I was concerned.

  My parents and I had returned to France when I was three, but I loved that town house on Seventy-ninth Street, every corner of which I knew so well. It was a beautiful limestone building, typical of New York, opulent looking, and right beside Central Park. In fact, it was just a few steps away from one of just two roads that ran all the way through to the west side of the park. I loved the sound of the crosstown bus that stopped before the front door. It was for me the sound of New York. Yes, New York was magical. With smoke billowing out of the street, it seemed the opposite of Paris, where I was living in a very quiet street near the Bois de Boulogne, in the Sixteenth Arrondissement. Today the building belongs to my aunt Elaine, Alexandre’s widow, my mother’s brother having died in 1987 at the age of sixty-six.

  * * *

  The steps were once framed by Rodin’s Thinker and its companion, The Age of Bronze. But the black-and-white marble mosaics of the entrance hall—similar to those in rue La Boétie—are still there, as they were in the exhibition halls that I wasn’t allowed to enter as a small child. The elevator, modern in the 1950s, is practically an antique today, with its sliding aluminum door. I know by heart the sound it makes and the way it slows, shuddering, as it reaches each floor. My parents and I lived on the third floor, but I sometimes slipped out on the floor below, hoping to spot some “clients,” as my grandfather grandly called them, although I couldn’t see how they were any more important than the customers at the Zitomer pharmacy on the corner of Seventy-eighth Street and Madison.

  My grandparents shared a bedroom in their apartment on the second floor but had separate bathrooms, which always intrigued me. The television was in their bedroom, and it was there that I saw my first westerns, vintage ones with cowboys and Indians, covered wagons in a circle, and flaming arrows. The first television shows too, with women in New Look fashions created by Christian Dior in the fifties: women in wide gathered skirts and crewneck twinsets. There weren’t many anchorwomen, no women journalists; women just presented the commercials—so deliciously dated today—for huge blue and pink American cars that created Detroit and then left it in ruins, cars you come across only in Cuba these days: “See the USA in your Chevrolet” … The refrain from the 1950s still echoes in my head.

  * * *

  New York was snow, Central Park, my sled, and the magic of the Santas ringing their bells to draw in the window-shoppers outside Bloomingdale’s.

  New York was chocolate sundaes spilling over with whipped cream in the modern ice-cream parlors with their fake red leather banquettes, my first Walt Disney cartoons, mountains of toys at FAO Schwarz, on the corner of Fifth Avenue and East Fifty-eighth Street where the iciest gusts in the city blew, but where children like me were warmed by the consoling sight of those immense teddy bears that we never bought but that filled our dreams.

  Above all, New York meant a month off from school, the only drawback being the math lessons my mother insisted on giving me. Faced with my inability to grasp problems about the distances between train tracks and the gaps between fence posts, she would end up throwing pencils and scraps of paper at me, telling me I’d never make anything of myself. The pencils were the ones with which Americans wrote on lined yellow paper—the “legal pads” you see in Mad Men—less formal than the shiny sheets in my Parisian Clairefontaine school notebooks.

  Fifty years later on TV, I see Obama’s advisers coming out of the West Wing carrying the same lined yellow pads and those inevitable sharpened pencils, blissfully unaware that those same pencils once grazed the head of a little math dunce. This is the retro side of an America that still prefers its shops to have old wooden doors with rattling, gilded knobs rather than the big glass doors that open automatically as soon as you cross the threshold of any French pharmacy.

  * * *

  New York meant endless family discussions between parents and grandparents about France, which was imploding, even though news of the unstable Fourth Republic* reached us only in fragments. Politics? It was talked about, of course. As a little girl I vaguely understood that it was a world intended for grown-ups, something grave and mysterious, to which I was unb
elievably lucky to have been exposed.

  I had always preferred to act beyond my years around things I didn’t understand. Before I was even two years old, I imitated my parents by pretending to read The New York Times—if upside down. At four, I assumed a look of great concentration when my father summoned me to discuss what he called serious matters. This happened whenever governments fell, every month or so. My father would address me, struggling not to laugh: “Anne, some serious things are happening: the cabinet [that was what the government was called in those days] has been overturned.”

  “Oh!” I would say, horrified at the apocalyptic vision he had just evoked, because the word for “cabinet” also meant “water closet.” “Something has to be done.” My father went on. “Me, I’ll take charge of foreign affairs.” “Me, I’ll take the train,” I invariably replied, without understanding a word he was saying, but delighted that my beloved father thought me a worthy partner for his grown-up conversations. My grandfather would burst out laughing, and I was very proud to amuse my family even without understanding what was so funny. On reflection, I took my first steps in political debate at the town house on Seventy-ninth Street, an experience that must have stayed with me in my twenty years as a political journalist in France.

  New York in those days was synonymous with happiness, treats, holidays. My parents and I went there at first by ocean liner, which meant four or five long seasick days, and then, before the first Boeing flights began, by Super Constellations, big carrier planes that stopped at Shannon in Ireland and at Gander in the northeast of Newfoundland.

  Pinned to my little coat was the Cours Hattemer, the “cross of honor,” awarded by my school to the term’s best pupils. It was utterly ridiculous, that cross, a miniature copy of the Croix de la Légion d’Honneur. On the bus, passengers would ask my mother what heroic deeds I had performed to deserve that military-style decoration.